Tuesday, January 27, 2009

On Deleuze and Guattari

Read the first 25 or so pages of A Thousand Plateaus. At first I was skeptical, and frightened. After all, these fellas were just going on and on about rhizomes, tubers, couch grass, crab grass, Little Richard, and who knows what else.

But after the shock of their style had worn off on me, I found myself attracted, even entranced by their writing style. Moreover, as I have been in pitched battle with Foucault for the last couple of months, it was interesting to read the folks who embrace particularism to an extent only imagined in a text like Discipline and Punish. My major question as I read the intro was just one of orientation and alternative. It would, of course, be fabulous if everyone embraced this hyper-articulation that evaded and dodged all reference to structure in any determining way, but I struggle to understand the utility of such an approach in a world where structures, state apparatuses, and signifiers all "do not float far enough".

As we continue in this Deleuze reading group, I eagerly anticipate A) ferreting out their critique of psychoanalysis, B) understanding what practical implications their recommendations may have and C) figuring out if we can ever know that we are on a plateau.

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